Twice shy stretches to forever shy, at least at work. Interest in her awaits interest in me. Every thought of attempting to get to know her is shadowed by my treatment of Herself and how I have been judged for it. And she is shy, like Herself, and I don’t think I can work that hard again. She doesn’t know it, but it’s her turn. I have hope, just not in her. I have hope in the woman who doesn’t presume to know me as she thinks she knows all men; the woman who isn’t waiting for me; the woman who shows her interest; the woman who could never think of me as an obsessive monster–not before she got to know me and forgave me that past.

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I have a lot to apologize for, some more for which I won’t, none of which I feel I am allowed to. More, I need to be forgiven. My last apology was not accepted. I have been punished for long enough over that. Not true–I’m enjoying it. This whole thing has been an application for martyrdom. Cupid can arrow me through the palms. Cue the agony, countdown to ecstasy. Herself is the cottage industry in my head. It’s taking too long to turn her into a symbol, because I can’t get over her humanness. I rue it and I embrace it. She is my muse only perversely: I don’t believe a muse can be reluctant any more than I can believe love is unrequited. What is someone who doesn’t love me but exactly that? What is what I thought was love? If I was in love, I wasn’t sharing it very well. Would it, then, not have been love? Hm. I was ready to believe I was in love. All I lacked was a willing partner. I didn’t let that stop me.

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Wet is just wet, and cold is just cold. I learned that on a bicycle. I feel them, but the discomfort reaches a threshold beyond which they are just films on the skin. Alone is alone, too, on a bike, but not just. Alone comes from the inside, oozing out a shield against all that it wants. What it thinks it’s protecting me from, I don’t know. Eventually, I get out of the cold and wet and get dry and warm, and the alone expands. I hate the alone, but I own it, like some people own depression: It’s one of the definitions of the self. Alone chose me and formed me, made me in its image. It is not me; but I am it.

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“…Like that!” still rings in my ears. Herself did not like being the co-star of my fantasies (or the target of my tirades). Or letting the world read them. “I don’t like you writing about me…like that!” and I knew what a fool I’d been–a child in a room of adults, playing by the only rules I knew, and alone. It had not been a game to anyone but me. I am not ashamed of the fantasies. It calmed me to imagine us on her sofa in pajamas, her leaning back on my chest, watching British sitcoms. Was that enough to have offended her? or did it take my mind’s hands gliding ove her body to embarrass and enrage her? How real does a fantasy have to appear to someone before it’s real enough to be offensible? But these don’t seem important questions. Herself didn’t need a reason to be offended, and I didn’t need to know where the line was to keep from crossing it. The times I did so I did brazenly. But the line I crossed with the flowers was invisible to me, not painted by a code of ethics in the recognizable hues of danger long before I’d reached it to consider crossing it, but striped behind me as I stared into the dark blue eyes of angry disdain pushing me backwards over it.

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Life is an experiment made up of smaller experiments, a grope for formulas–for love, happiness, peace of mind, good sex. I thought I was creative, but I’m a scientist. Is scrutiny my life? Am I finding my self or creating it? Such imagination it takes to delude oneself! Finding is to accepting as creating is to deluding. But I change every day. I’m under a constant barrage of tiny, new experiences. It’s better to draw the outline and fill it in as I go than to try to complete the picture each day.

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The idea of “helpmate” has been introduced to me, and I wonder if that isn’t what I’m looking for. It isn’t, but it’s probably what I’d settle for. It would be nice to have someone around to ease the practical burdens of everday life, but that person would be a maid and a cook. What is a helpmate beyond that? There are other burdens to be made less burdensome. Can a helpmate also be the ear to listen, the hand to hold, the mouth to kiss? Emotion is missing from the word “helpmate,” a resignation to the practical side of a relationship wherein passion is designated little to no room. I’m not equipped, after all, to settle for a helpmate–too stubborn, too hopeful to give up on a birthright. I have given up on a lot of things I once thought I’d be or do, but those were pieces that didn’t fit into the puzzle of me. To make “helpmate” fit would require nothing less than the redesigning of the puzle, and that’s an idea whose time I hope never comes.

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I have heard and been told too often that one can choose to be happy. I am offended by the necessarily concomitant implication that one can otherwise choose to be unhappy. It’s that easy, is it? Who wants to be unhappy? Unhappines is an inability to be happy, to find what would make one happy. I do choose happiness, but not knowing what it is I can, at best, only attempt to create what I think it is. Knowing my needs but not how to attain them–that’s unhappiness. Not knowing peace or where to find it. Not knowing love or even what it is. What’s to choose when choosing isn’t receiving? What makes happiness a commodity? What makes anything a commodity but need and supply? Love, peace, happiness–they all seem to command a price, but did I not pay that price when I was born? Unhappiness is the frustration in waiting for that delivery.